Studied Like the Light
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: The Professor watches. Nemo doesn’t stop him. Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, slash


**Title:** Studied Like the Light

**Fandom: **20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

**Pairing: **Captain Nemo / Professor Aronnax

**Summary:** The Professor watches. Nemo doesn't stop him.

**Studied Like the Light**

The Professor's studies are precise, perfect, technically accurate in all respects. Under his pens and pencils every structure of the beings he examines are carefully explicated, the scientific purpose for the images plain. But he is good, very good, and so his studies are more than studies, they are lovely gems of sketches, alive and elegant on the paper.

He understands things about light, does Professor Pierre Aronnax, can use the suggestion of it to make a drawing breathe. It's quite impressive.

Nemo watches him from time to time, studying the rapid, purposeful movements of his pencil across the paper, examining the minute changes in expression that accompany his sketching. The Professor has a most mobile and open face, and when he sketches his forehead furrows, his mouth twitches and twists, and everything he feels, every instant of concentration, is written across it. Nemo enjoys seeing that, enjoys the way the Professor is so contained and polite and yet incapable of being closed, of shutting himself up in his own mind.

Strange, then, that Nemo cannot easily understand him. The professor is an open book, yet it seems as if every page that book opens to is covered in riddles. Riddles within riddles, and Nemo cannot resist riddles. He thinks of the Professor as being like that tangled knot of physics that he, he Nemo, carefully untangled and laid out and understood so that he could run his _Nautilus _ with them.

He wants to do the same thing with the Professor. Wants to solve all his puzzles, untangle those knotted enigmas, separate out the strands of compassion and innocence and knowing and spread them carefully out so they'll make sense. Nemo wants terribly to understand the Professor's component riddles, because if he does understand them perhaps the question of why he wants to keep the Professor will be answered, or will cease to be important, or will be in some other way resolved. He wants to carefully untie the Professor from himself and make _sense_ of him.

It worries him, how important he finds it to be careful. It is disturbing, how much the thought of being gentle to the Professor attracts him. There is a softness to his thoughts of learning how to read the Professor, a sort of suffusing fondness that suggests the kind of light that does not exist aboard the _Nautilus_. The light here is bright and harsh, nearly overpowering to the eye. But the Professor sets him in mind of a wood fire, closely contained on a hearth. It has been years since he sat before a wood fire, but he remembers the way they soothe and fascinate.

One can watch a wood fire for hours and hours, until it dies down to coals, and still be surprised by the way it flares and wavers. Nemo used to watch them and watch them, idly, but intently, trying to find a pattern of movement within them. Every time he thought he had one, it slipped away, changed, twisted, and he was left to start again. It was a good way to find sleep on a sleepless night.

The Professor draws the eye and mind in the same way. The Professor is many things. Metaphors could tangle themselves around him forever. Nemo tires of it. But, to his great exasperation, he does not tire of the Professor.

He should like to be tired of him. He should like to be able to turn away from the Professor with no wish to turn back. He should like to be freed of this bizarre urge to reason out what is beyond him. He tries to weary of the whole business, to simply and sharply end this foolish behavior on his part.

But he doesn't know how to summon the will to do so. And just when he thinks he might have a way, the Professor looks up from his work and sees him and Nemo…

Nemo looks at him and knows he's being watched, held up to the light, questioned, and carefully understood as a whole. The Professor is attempting to understand him in his entirety, although the Professor cannot possibly know everything about him. Indeed, the Professor knows very little about him, and yet Nemo knows he seeks to understand him anyway, just as he sought to understand the ocean from above its surface. An absurd endeavor, and an insane one, and yet he somehow succeeded fairly well.

It makes Nemo uneasy, being watched that way, and yet there is such a polite curiosity and frank delight in the Professor when he looks t Nemo as if Nemo is something strange and wild and beautiful to be understood, that Nemo cannot really be too offended. It sweeps away the beginnings of his resolve to drop the matter and squash this embarrassing, unasked for fondness in himself. It makes him feel like doing such a ridiculous thing as going to sit next to the Professor and giving him answers. Telling him things Nemo doesn't talk about.

He doesn't do it, of course. He's not that mad yet, and he won't become so. But he doesn't leave, either.

He stays where he is, staring out at the sea, and lets the Professor catch him in a sketch, drifting the harsh shadows of the outer lamp back onto his features to make him breath upon the page.

Nemo lets himself be studied.


End file.
